The Mo’ne Davis Craze Is Over…For Now

ByJeremy Gordon

Mo’ne Davis at first base on Wednesday, the day before her team was eliminated from the Little League World Series.

Associated Press

Unless we’re calling him the next Michael Jordan, it’s exceedingly rare that a teenager galvanizes the national sports conversation. That was before Mo’ne Davis, the phenom Little League pitcher who caught everyone’s attention not for what she might do in the future, but what she was doing right now…as a 13-year old girl, which is even rarer.

Davis, a pitcher for the Philadelphia-area Taney Dragons, would be impressive even if it weren’t for her double-X chromosomes: She throws in the low 70s, where most Little League pitchers struggle to reach, and until Thursday was leading her team through the tournament. But the rareness of a girl dominating a traditionally boy-controlled sport grabbed headlines, giving Davis the first “Sports Illustrated” cover for a Little Leaguer and winning her the admiration of thousands who saw her as a potential role model rather than a 13-year-old. She is a 13-year-old, it’s important to note, one who dreams of playing college basketball, though she is long past the point of going unnoticed. When Philadelphia was knocked out of the World Series on Thursday, that meant the end of her current run in the spotlight.

But the attention isn’t dying down. There is already a micro-industry built around her brand, and a serious discussion about her future given her potential earning power as an endorser. “Black kids stopped playing baseball a long time ago. And girls never really played at all,” writes Deadspin’s Dave McKenna. “Yet here’s a black girl dominating kids in baseball, while the world’s biggest sports network is making people watch.” (It’s even more unique given that her Philadelphia team is an inner-city squad, which are usually even more neglected.) That amounts to big money, even if it would blast an RPG in the side of her amateur eligibility—which, a cynic might say, will only go so far given the dearth of opportunity for female athletes beyond the collegiate level.

Of course, that’s the adult way of looking at it. As mentioned, Davis is still 13, and her accomplishments—among them, becoming the first female pitcher to throw a shutout at the Little League World Series—would deserve attention even if it weren’t for her gender. “Mo’ne Davis has earned her fame not just by being there, but by being dominant when she arrived,” Kurt Mensching writes for SB Nation. “She should be congratulated. She should be celebrated. She should not be a fount for your expectations.” It might prove to be more complicated than that.

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It is estimated that football players suffer hundreds of sub-concussive blows during the season, but their injuries take place on game day and at practice. Pro wrestling, by comparison, sees its wrestlers work through a 300-plus day schedule with no time off for recovery, leading its stars to compensate by abusing painkillers and other drugs that ease the trauma. Diamond Dallas Page, a former wrestler, saw how many of his friends had succumbed to addiction, and decided to start a yoga program aimed at helping former tough guys like him work through their injuries. He has helped legendary wrestlers like Jake “The Snake” Roberts and Scott “Razor Ramon” Hall reclaim their lives, one pose at a time, which is no simple task given the career precedent. At the New York Times Magazine, Alex French spends some time with Page to see how he works his magic.

“N.F.L. injuries may have grabbed all the headlines, but pro wrestling is suffering quietly through its own health crisis. In a 2003 survey of news reports, a medical examiner found that the death rate for wrestlers 40 years old and younger is seven times as great as that of the general population,” he writes. “From 1983 to 2003, 64 wrestlers in that age group died, many of them from heart problems or from complications of drug and alcohol abuse. A rough calculation of more recent numbers, from 2004 to 2007, indicates that at least another 18 under age 50 died as well. Eddie Guerrero, a W.W.E. champion who wrote a book about his recovery from addiction to alcohol and painkillers, died of heart failure at 38. Chris Benoit had multiple drugs in his system when he strangled his wife, suffocated his son and hanged himself. He also had 10 times the normal amount of testosterone in his system.”

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If you have been reading the Fix for a few years, you may have noticed links to articles at Sports on Earth, which up until recently employed dozens of writers and produced just as many good stories. Many of those writers, however, were laid off following some corporate restructuring by the site’s parent company, erasing yet another landing destination for quality writing. One of them, Howard Megdal, writes at VICE what the closure of Sports on Earth means for sports writing. It’s a little bit inside-baseball, but it’s of interest to anyone who wants to keep reading good sports stories on the internet.

“Trying to put money and good storytelling together is a tricky problem, one that editors, writers, and publications have been trying to crack for decades—but when they solve it, even briefly, the reward is work that lives on for years and is worthy of saving and rereading,” he writes. “People stay on sites that publish great pieces for a long time, they come back to those sites, they remember them long after they’ve disappeared into the ether where mastheads go when they die. Who says that about a sideboob slideshow?”

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